If you own an Android phone, and you’ve misplaced it, the chances are pretty good you’ll be able to locate your phone if you’ve planned ahead.

If you haven’t planned ahead yet, then this article is for you. You’ll learn about five different ways you can configure your phone and various accounts so that if you ever do misplace it, you’ll be able to find it again with just the click of a button.

1. Find My Device

If you have an Android phone, then you most likely have a Google account connected to it. Because of this, Google is well situated to find the location of your phone whenever you need.

Verizon Family Locator

Verizon’s solution for locating phones is a service called Family Locator. Once you’ve signed up for the service, you just need to install the Verizon Family Locator app on each phone you want to track.

T-Mobile FamilyWhere

FamilyWhere lets you locate any phone on the plan, or automate the process by getting text notifications when they visit certain places. Family members can also “check in” to let each other know where they are at any given time.

If you’re signed up for the T-Mobile FamilyWhere service, you just have to install the app from Google Play.

Sprint Family Locator

Sprint offers a service called Family Locator, which could just as easily be called “Sprint Phone Locator”.

Sprint’s app is one of the highest rated family locator apps on Google Play, compared to the other cellular providers.

With Sprint Family Locator you can set locations to receive “safety checks” when family members arrive there safely. You can also see where everyone is at once on a single map, and see a location history for every phone. And of course, if anyone in the family lost their phone, the app will show them where to find it.

As you can see, nearly every major cellular provider in the U.S. offers a phone location service of some kind that’ll help you find your Android device if you ever lose it.

While every smart watch is different, the concept is the same. You should have an app available on your watch called something like “Find My Phone”. This is what it looks like on my Gear S3 Frontier.

The app is very simple to use. On the Apple Watch, it’s called “pinging” your phone. On Samsung, it’s just a matter of pressing the green start button to ring your phone.

While your phone is ringing, you’ll see the status screen on the smart watch showing that it’s trying to make contact with your phone by sending the ringtone.

With the amount of times every week that I place my phone under a piece of paper or under some clothing in my bedroom, I’ve lost count how often I’ve used this feature. I no longer panic when I can’t immediately find my phone — I just call up this app on my smart watch and make my phone start calling out to me.

It’s a beautiful invention for absent-minded people.

4. Find My Android Apps

In addition to all of the tools described above that you have available for finding your lost Android, there are also a number of great apps available that you can install on your phone so you can use any web-connected computer or some other smartphone to find your misplaced phone. The following are a few of the best ones.

The Find My Phone by SMS app is a simple but effective concept. All you have to do is set up a special keyword that you can use to text your phone from any other phone, and receive the nearest street address of where your phone is located.

The reply SMS also includes a Google Maps image of the location where your phone is located.

Download: Find My Phone by SMS (Free) [No Longer Available]

Whistle & Find – Phone Finder

Another useful method for finding your phone if it’s located somewhere in your house is the Whistle & Find app. This app lets you walk through your house while whistling.

Some of the older reviews of these kinds of apps mention that background music or notification pings could set off the app. I tested this app using Spotify to play instrumental music with violins that sounded a lot like whistling, and it didn’t affect the app at all. It only responded to my whistling, and it worked every time.

You can enable the “clap” feature instead, if you prefer to locate your Android by clapping instead of whistling.

Once you activate full admin permissions on your phone, you can remotely use this app to take pictures, trigger a ringtone, send an SMS with the phone location, and even enable a motion alarm.

Each feature has a configuration menu that you can use to tailor alerts and actions. For the purpose of this article, the area you’ll want to focus on so you can remotely check the location of your Android phone is the GPS setup page.

Ryan has a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering. He's worked 13 years in automation engineering, 5 years in IT, and now is an Apps Engineer. A former Managing Editor of MakeUseOf, he's spoken at national conferences on Data Visualization and has been featured on national TV and radio.